I thought of a better example. Sorry, I really should be going to lunch now, and I'm obviously distracted.
Think of your processor as a road, with each core being a lane. On an empty road, you're limited by the speed limit (theoretically). Adding a lane does nothing whatsoever for you. Now add one guy turning left in front of you; on a 100 mile trip, its statistically insignificant, but a two lane road would have meant that you wouldn't have had to slow down at all and a single-lane road might have brought you to a standstill for a minute while you waited behind him. That's the level of annoyance that a dual-core system eliminates.
The dual-core machines don't help that much unless code is written for them specifically; there's precious little code that can really whup a dual-core just yet.
Yeah, if only we had something that let us work on two different programs at the same time. Oh, right, we do, its called a multitasking OS. Even if you don't do anything like ripping CDs, chances are good that you're running multiple widgets, all doing their things at the same time. You're checking emails, running an RSS gatherer, indexing your disk, providing good desktop interactivity, and working on a new proposal (which is formatting your page as you type, checking your spelling, et cetera). Most people multitask way more than they think; the key isn't long periods of parallelization, its eliminating those annoying short blips of contention.
And if you're a developer, this is a no-brainer. You've probably got at least one DBMS on your machine; running client software, a dev environment, the database, and keeping good responsiveness is so much easier with a dual core (or better) setup.
And under Windows, you can easily run IE6 as a standalone application (just Google for details, they're everywhere). That still doesn't change the fact that in your desktop environment you will have one default HTML rendering widget - whether your desktop is KDE, Gnome, OSX or WinXP. Installing IE7 upgrades that widget under Windows.
Oh, heck, you don't even need to google it yourself. Here's one way of doing it without changing your standard renderer. You can use a similar technique to get a standalone IE6 image and then install IE7 traditionally to run both and get the new renderer as the default. See? Not too hard.
Well, most of the coolness of IE7 is in the HTML rendering widget, which is a core OS component. After all, without it you wouldn't get all of the trickle-down CSS compliance, et cetera. This is actually a Good Thing in this case; rendering HTML is the kind of task that programs shouldn't have to do themselves (in this day and age). You can write - and indeed many people have written - new "iexplore"ish front ends to the MSIE widget. Heck, there's even an easy way for Firefox to use it to render pages. So people who care have had IE's rendering with tabs, etc, for a long time now.
If you think of it as two upgrades, one to the renderer (much appreciated) and one to the front end (eh), it makes a lot more sense.
On the bright side, English is a quickly mutating bastard language which seems fairly evolvable but sometimes I wonder if I should learn Japanese, Russian, or German and then end up with a new outlook on life.
I would say so. I still remember that when I was learning French there was a moment of epiphany when I started to actually think in French, as opposed to doing translation on the fly. Some things were easier to consider that way, and there was a noticable difference in my thought patterns. Scary and cool at the same time. Now take that concept, and think (in whatever language) about all of the new doublethink words we're getting these days. About talking points that are repeated so much that they become part of common unrelated conversations, as phrases almost becoming words since they're used as blocks. Scary, eh?
Their stock did not drop 20% of its value. It dropped 20% of its price. Unless you truly believe that Google, its assets, revenue stream, et cetera, have no inherent value. The company is the same company that it was before the price drop. If you're buying shares because you believe in its ability to make money over the long term, this price drop was a Good Thing.
Or you could just buy a Mac and enjoy a computer that's "on" as soon as you finish opening the lid, which removes a large portion of the need for this special screen. Admittedly you would still have to open it, but considering that you already need to unzip your bag, take the laptop out, orient it, et ceteara, popping open the screen is no big deal. Unless you're on a Windows laptop that can take an amazing long time to go from sleep mode to fully functional (like mine).
They may look native to a screenshot, but they still don't feel native, at least not the last time I checked them out. Its nothing major, its the little things, like the way that text boxes work in call cases - I'd have to go back and reexamine an app to come up with a list, and I'm not that bored, but they're just not generally polished, operationally.
I will agree that the huge array of custom- or skinnable-widget VB apps are both awful and a horrible step back in functionality. Any apps, really. Even things like Hamachi, which is a fantastic technical service, get real old real fast when you can't tell if you're minimizing or closing a window.
I had this experience on Windows. Ya know what? I'm using IE for most of my regular browsing. I'm even using it right now. It doesn't crash, it supports all of my plugins, and I've never really been a huge fan of tabs (at times, yes, but mostly I ignore them). I don't click on random executables, I don't install arbitrary ActiveX controls, and I've never been infected... IE, like XP, is pretty much "good enough," for a whole slew of people who just want to render them some HTML.
Re:There's a feedback system. Virus affects it...
on
Obesity Contagious?
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· Score: 1
Its funny - and please don't take this personally, since its about me but was triggered by your email - when I was at my heaviest I felt that I had probably 20 or so pounds to lose. Certainly no more than 30. As I started to lose weight, I would look at myself in the mirror and try to figure out how much was fat and how much was "frame" (after all, I had convinced myself that I was large framed). I figured that 200 lbs would be about right.
The same thing happened when I got to 200. I was amazed that I still didn't feel "fit" and figured that I had maybe 10-15 still to go! That was a revelation. Once I got to 180 things slowed down, but even at 165 I'm realizing that I have excess fat that's not helping anything. I'm happy with my weight; I wouldn't mind losing 5 more pounds, maybe converting some of it into muscle, but I'm certainly not fat by anyone's definition - I'm just not as toned as I like.
But your post just reminded me of that layering sequence of transitions I made, each time convinced that I was only a little overweight. As for you - well, as long as you're happy, that's the main thing. And 128 is certainly low enough to be unhealthy for many people. However, if you could feel the difference between 240 and 200 you might surprise yourself and find your mind changing. You might not. But I know that I did.
You can grab a free copy of the Visual C# IDE from Microsoft. Start with something simple, like this sample program that reads serial output and dumps it into a window. Then add the gui parts - and there's obscene amounts of sample code for writing Windows GUIs. The advantage to using C# is that there's a strong likelyhood that if you need something special, you can buy a widget that handles it for you for $200 (under most Open environments it would be free, but it wouldn't work - at least once you get into the more obscure ones).
Problem solved with a small amount of money and a small amount of time - and you have a standards-based application that any other Windows programmer will understand and be able to maintain. Unless you really want to spend all of your time working on stuff like this because you're the only person in the company who knows how to use your TCL/whatever/hybrid built-into-an-exe mess of a program? Cool as it may be, if it can't be trivially handed off to someone, its your problem for as long as you stay at the company.
And you end up with a product that has that wonderful "Almost as good as real Windows software" feel to it. For many applications, this doesn't matter. For some, it does.
If you want a quick-n-dirty Windows GUI app that just works, VB is the way to go.
Wow, did I screw that up. The sizes were something like 26cm and 34cm. I don't know what land my brain was in yesterday when I posted the original comment. Still, the large pizza, being thin crust, was smaller than say a CPK individual pizza. The small would have been considered insulting in most American restaurants.
Laptops. There are many of us who find ourselves working out of hotels, airports, wherever. Having to log in again to multiple sites all the damn time would suck.
Because you know what? The only places where I stay "logged in" are the ones that I don't care about. My bank makes me log in every time I use it - fair enough. But slashdot? Who gives a rat's arse? What's worse, the main people who would implement this would be the very people for whom security should be the least concern, like the vendor message boards which, while useful, think they're being l33t by making you sign in with a 17 byte password as if your chat account was as important as nuclear launch codes.
Re:Scoffing Posts Are From Those With Sort/No Memo
on
Hard Drive Memory Lane
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· Score: 1
I remember back in the early 80s - I think around '83 - having a half-height (!) Winchester hard drive in my TI PC luggable computer. 10MB if I remember correctly, and if it wasn't for the fact that my father was working for TI at the time, I sincerely doubt we'd have had one. It was pretty great, but I have to admit that the best part of owning one was listening to that wonderful 15 second spin-up at boot time, easy to hear even over the fan howl.
Or that their target audience (or most common shoppers) are the kind of people who really don't care, and having price tags lying around just makes the displays look ugly and cluttered.
If whatever system relies on this backup is generating you $1,000,000 per hour, then an array like this would pay for itself in one four-hour outage. But, that doesn't take into account opportunity cost: you could still be better off if you put that $4 million to use generating revenue; if it made back more than the outage costs you you're still on top.
Well, yes and no. Let's say that the system is generating $1mm per hour in revenue. What do you think the potential backlash would be from a four hour downtime in terms of customer satisfaction, media coverage, et cetera? I'd guess well over that $1mm of lost revenue, and it can last for a long, long time.
No - they lie, cheat, steal... but their bodies are sending them messages all the time that they are, literally, starving to death. Its awful. But after meeting someone like that, or even watching a doco, you realize just how pathetic some of the people who claim that they "have to eat," really are when, really, they have no such condition. And I've been misspelling it - check out http://www.moddrc.com/Information-Disabilities/Fas tFacts/prader.htm for more details.
Many people with Prader-Willi Syndrome are at great risk of death in their teens or twenties because of complications caused by extreme obesity. In contrast, when people with Prader-Willi receive round the clock food supervision, they can expect to live normal life-spans. People with Prader-Willi cannot choose to monitor their own diets. They are unable to resist food. To refuse to monitor their food is to condemn them to extreme obesity and its consequences. Several people with Prader-Willi Syndrome were taken off restrictive diets because the decision was made that as adults, they had the "right" to eat whatever they wished. Most gained over 100 pounds in six months, resulting in medical complications. After several died, the others were again placed on more restrictive food diets.
Re:There's a feedback system. Virus affects it...
on
Obesity Contagious?
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· Score: 1
Oh, I agree. At least, I do now. That's why I had that in quotes. I was obese, no question about it.
Re:Virus or not, individuals can control it.
on
Obesity Contagious?
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· Score: 1
The U.S. Army has a program for overweight recruits. There is a very strict diet and excercise program. They're very careful to keep people from losing weight too quickly. I have NEVER heard of anyone who couldn't lose weight through this program, nor has anyone ever starved to death on it. That to me, is proof enough, that weight can be controlled by excercise and diet.
And this is key. I truly believe that unless you have a very rare medical condition - an untreatable one at that - that all it takes is a combination of willpower and education to lose weight.
Having said that, its like quitting smoking. Knowing that you should lose weight is good, but not enough. You actually have to seriously, internally, decide that you will lose weight and restructure your lifestyle accordingly... or be placed into a controlling environment where someone else can change it and enforce those changes, but outside of the military those are few and far between.
Eat less. Exercise more. Everybody knows how to lose weight... just like everybody has a thousand excuses as to why it wouldn't work for them. Put down the pills. Put down the desserts, too, while you're at it. Now get out there and move.
Assuming that you're not actually gaining weight... If you eat the same amount as you do now, but add 45 minutes of walking per day, you'll lose weight. If you keep your same activity level but cut out some food every day (heck, keep eating out if you want to but start getting the "lunch portion" for dinner) then you'll lose weight. It won't be huge, and it won't be fast, but even one pound a week (that's only 500 calories a day) will get you 50 pounds in a year.
In the same way, we know that you can make a rat obese by altering its genetics- it's called the Zucker rat. If you block leptin receptors altogether (leptin is a hormone released by adipose, "fat", tissue) then you can promote feelings of starvation. And if a virus wants to make sure it'll have a nice, long lifetime with little risk-taking and lots of sitting on the part of its host, if it can make its host morbidly fat then it's a good gambit (at least, as long as it's doing so in a culture in which obesity is a feasible survival model for the host, i.e. our culture).
There are people with issues like this - things like Pradr-Willis syndrome. They tend to have some commonalities:
o They're incredibly large, and continue to gain weight all the time o Sadly, they almost always die very young because of this
I'm talking about people who are always hungry, and may well be weighing 400-600 lbs by the time they turn 18, even after their parents have put locks on all the food cabinets, etc. Its a tragedy, and its a very well documented medical condition.
Most people, and by most I mean way, way more than 99%, do not have these conditions. Most people who are overweight are lazy, or acclimatized to their weight, or don't truly understand their food needs.
Its funny... I never used to think that there were a ton of fat people around. I figured that the obesity thing was exaggerated. Most people looked "normal," to me. Heck, I could have stood to lose 10 lbs or so, maybe 20, but I was still pretty normal.
Then I wised up, and shed 80 lbs, going from 240+ down to the low 160s. And you know what? I'm still not at a "skinny" body fat percentage. Healthy, sure, but not skinny.
Normal != Healthy. Fat is relative. Go hang out somewhere like Europe for a couple of weeks, then come back and see how many fat people you start noticing.
Good for you! I did something similar a couple of years ago. Its amazing how, once you actually decide to get healthy instead of just thinking that you should get healthy (or worse, pretending that you are healthy), making it happen becomes the easy part.
A few people will keep a significant amount of body fat no matter how much they excercise, unless they are actually starving.
While this is true, its moderately misleading; a very few people will have this condition, where the body will purge muscle before fat, etc.
Don't forget that everything we do will alter either the "calories in" or "calories out" side of the equation. Atkins people do weird things that get their body to reject calories that are ingested. Distance runners burn a lot more as part of their day. People doing a lot of weight work will convince their body to spend more calories building muscle instead of stockpiling fat, but don't generally actually burn them (the "metabolism" boost that you get after a workout has been shown to exist at a chemical level, but its only 20-30 calories or so for the day, so almost irrelevant).
Slashdot Mirror
I thought of a better example. Sorry, I really should be going to lunch now, and I'm obviously distracted.
Think of your processor as a road, with each core being a lane. On an empty road, you're limited by the speed limit (theoretically). Adding a lane does nothing whatsoever for you. Now add one guy turning left in front of you; on a 100 mile trip, its statistically insignificant, but a two lane road would have meant that you wouldn't have had to slow down at all and a single-lane road might have brought you to a standstill for a minute while you waited behind him. That's the level of annoyance that a dual-core system eliminates.
The dual-core machines don't help that much unless code is written for them specifically; there's precious little code that can really whup a dual-core just yet.
Yeah, if only we had something that let us work on two different programs at the same time. Oh, right, we do, its called a multitasking OS. Even if you don't do anything like ripping CDs, chances are good that you're running multiple widgets, all doing their things at the same time. You're checking emails, running an RSS gatherer, indexing your disk, providing good desktop interactivity, and working on a new proposal (which is formatting your page as you type, checking your spelling, et cetera). Most people multitask way more than they think; the key isn't long periods of parallelization, its eliminating those annoying short blips of contention.
And if you're a developer, this is a no-brainer. You've probably got at least one DBMS on your machine; running client software, a dev environment, the database, and keeping good responsiveness is so much easier with a dual core (or better) setup.
And under Windows, you can easily run IE6 as a standalone application (just Google for details, they're everywhere). That still doesn't change the fact that in your desktop environment you will have one default HTML rendering widget - whether your desktop is KDE, Gnome, OSX or WinXP. Installing IE7 upgrades that widget under Windows.
Oh, heck, you don't even need to google it yourself. Here's one way of doing it without changing your standard renderer. You can use a similar technique to get a standalone IE6 image and then install IE7 traditionally to run both and get the new renderer as the default. See? Not too hard.
Well, most of the coolness of IE7 is in the HTML rendering widget, which is a core OS component. After all, without it you wouldn't get all of the trickle-down CSS compliance, et cetera. This is actually a Good Thing in this case; rendering HTML is the kind of task that programs shouldn't have to do themselves (in this day and age). You can write - and indeed many people have written - new "iexplore"ish front ends to the MSIE widget. Heck, there's even an easy way for Firefox to use it to render pages. So people who care have had IE's rendering with tabs, etc, for a long time now.
If you think of it as two upgrades, one to the renderer (much appreciated) and one to the front end (eh), it makes a lot more sense.
On the bright side, English is a quickly mutating bastard language which seems fairly evolvable but sometimes I wonder if I should learn Japanese, Russian, or German and then end up with a new outlook on life.
I would say so. I still remember that when I was learning French there was a moment of epiphany when I started to actually think in French, as opposed to doing translation on the fly. Some things were easier to consider that way, and there was a noticable difference in my thought patterns. Scary and cool at the same time. Now take that concept, and think (in whatever language) about all of the new doublethink words we're getting these days. About talking points that are repeated so much that they become part of common unrelated conversations, as phrases almost becoming words since they're used as blocks. Scary, eh?
One point I'd like to make -
Their stock did not drop 20% of its value. It dropped 20% of its price. Unless you truly believe that Google, its assets, revenue stream, et cetera, have no inherent value. The company is the same company that it was before the price drop. If you're buying shares because you believe in its ability to make money over the long term, this price drop was a Good Thing.
Or you could just buy a Mac and enjoy a computer that's "on" as soon as you finish opening the lid, which removes a large portion of the need for this special screen. Admittedly you would still have to open it, but considering that you already need to unzip your bag, take the laptop out, orient it, et ceteara, popping open the screen is no big deal. Unless you're on a Windows laptop that can take an amazing long time to go from sleep mode to fully functional (like mine).
100 years is "not long after"? Has the length of the year changed since then or what?
As a British ex-pat living in Texas (talk about culture shock), I'm always reminded of a saying I picked up somewhere...
"In America 50 years is a long time, just like in Europe 50 miles is a long distance."
And both sides are looked on as "weird" by the others for their point of view.
They may look native to a screenshot, but they still don't feel native, at least not the last time I checked them out. Its nothing major, its the little things, like the way that text boxes work in call cases - I'd have to go back and reexamine an app to come up with a list, and I'm not that bored, but they're just not generally polished, operationally.
I will agree that the huge array of custom- or skinnable-widget VB apps are both awful and a horrible step back in functionality. Any apps, really. Even things like Hamachi, which is a fantastic technical service, get real old real fast when you can't tell if you're minimizing or closing a window.
I had this experience on Windows. Ya know what? I'm using IE for most of my regular browsing. I'm even using it right now. It doesn't crash, it supports all of my plugins, and I've never really been a huge fan of tabs (at times, yes, but mostly I ignore them). I don't click on random executables, I don't install arbitrary ActiveX controls, and I've never been infected... IE, like XP, is pretty much "good enough," for a whole slew of people who just want to render them some HTML.
Its funny - and please don't take this personally, since its about me but was triggered by your email - when I was at my heaviest I felt that I had probably 20 or so pounds to lose. Certainly no more than 30. As I started to lose weight, I would look at myself in the mirror and try to figure out how much was fat and how much was "frame" (after all, I had convinced myself that I was large framed). I figured that 200 lbs would be about right.
The same thing happened when I got to 200. I was amazed that I still didn't feel "fit" and figured that I had maybe 10-15 still to go! That was a revelation. Once I got to 180 things slowed down, but even at 165 I'm realizing that I have excess fat that's not helping anything. I'm happy with my weight; I wouldn't mind losing 5 more pounds, maybe converting some of it into muscle, but I'm certainly not fat by anyone's definition - I'm just not as toned as I like.
But your post just reminded me of that layering sequence of transitions I made, each time convinced that I was only a little overweight. As for you - well, as long as you're happy, that's the main thing. And 128 is certainly low enough to be unhealthy for many people. However, if you could feel the difference between 240 and 200 you might surprise yourself and find your mind changing. You might not. But I know that I did.
You can grab a free copy of the Visual C# IDE from Microsoft. Start with something simple, like this sample program that reads serial output and dumps it into a window. Then add the gui parts - and there's obscene amounts of sample code for writing Windows GUIs. The advantage to using C# is that there's a strong likelyhood that if you need something special, you can buy a widget that handles it for you for $200 (under most Open environments it would be free, but it wouldn't work - at least once you get into the more obscure ones).
Problem solved with a small amount of money and a small amount of time - and you have a standards-based application that any other Windows programmer will understand and be able to maintain. Unless you really want to spend all of your time working on stuff like this because you're the only person in the company who knows how to use your TCL/whatever/hybrid built-into-an-exe mess of a program? Cool as it may be, if it can't be trivially handed off to someone, its your problem for as long as you stay at the company.
And you end up with a product that has that wonderful "Almost as good as real Windows software" feel to it. For many applications, this doesn't matter. For some, it does.
If you want a quick-n-dirty Windows GUI app that just works, VB is the way to go.
Wow, did I screw that up. The sizes were something like 26cm and 34cm. I don't know what land my brain was in yesterday when I posted the original comment. Still, the large pizza, being thin crust, was smaller than say a CPK individual pizza. The small would have been considered insulting in most American restaurants.
Laptops. There are many of us who find ourselves working out of hotels, airports, wherever. Having to log in again to multiple sites all the damn time would suck.
Because you know what? The only places where I stay "logged in" are the ones that I don't care about. My bank makes me log in every time I use it - fair enough. But slashdot? Who gives a rat's arse? What's worse, the main people who would implement this would be the very people for whom security should be the least concern, like the vendor message boards which, while useful, think they're being l33t by making you sign in with a 17 byte password as if your chat account was as important as nuclear launch codes.
I remember back in the early 80s - I think around '83 - having a half-height (!) Winchester hard drive in my TI PC luggable computer. 10MB if I remember correctly, and if it wasn't for the fact that my father was working for TI at the time, I sincerely doubt we'd have had one. It was pretty great, but I have to admit that the best part of owning one was listening to that wonderful 15 second spin-up at boot time, easy to hear even over the fan howl.
Or that their target audience (or most common shoppers) are the kind of people who really don't care, and having price tags lying around just makes the displays look ugly and cluttered.
If whatever system relies on this backup is generating you $1,000,000 per hour, then an array like this would pay for itself in one four-hour outage. But, that doesn't take into account opportunity cost: you could still be better off if you put that $4 million to use generating revenue; if it made back more than the outage costs you you're still on top.
Well, yes and no. Let's say that the system is generating $1mm per hour in revenue. What do you think the potential backlash would be from a four hour downtime in terms of customer satisfaction, media coverage, et cetera? I'd guess well over that $1mm of lost revenue, and it can last for a long, long time.
Oh, I agree. At least, I do now. That's why I had that in quotes. I was obese, no question about it.
The U.S. Army has a program for overweight recruits. There is a very strict diet and excercise program. They're very careful to keep people from losing weight too quickly. I have NEVER heard of anyone who couldn't lose weight through this program, nor has anyone ever starved to death on it. That to me, is proof enough, that weight can be controlled by excercise and diet.
And this is key. I truly believe that unless you have a very rare medical condition - an untreatable one at that - that all it takes is a combination of willpower and education to lose weight.
Having said that, its like quitting smoking. Knowing that you should lose weight is good, but not enough. You actually have to seriously, internally, decide that you will lose weight and restructure your lifestyle accordingly... or be placed into a controlling environment where someone else can change it and enforce those changes, but outside of the military those are few and far between.
Eat less. Exercise more. Everybody knows how to lose weight... just like everybody has a thousand excuses as to why it wouldn't work for them. Put down the pills. Put down the desserts, too, while you're at it. Now get out there and move.
Assuming that you're not actually gaining weight... If you eat the same amount as you do now, but add 45 minutes of walking per day, you'll lose weight. If you keep your same activity level but cut out some food every day (heck, keep eating out if you want to but start getting the "lunch portion" for dinner) then you'll lose weight. It won't be huge, and it won't be fast, but even one pound a week (that's only 500 calories a day) will get you 50 pounds in a year.
In the same way, we know that you can make a rat obese by altering its genetics- it's called the Zucker rat. If you block leptin receptors altogether (leptin is a hormone released by adipose, "fat", tissue) then you can promote feelings of starvation. And if a virus wants to make sure it'll have a nice, long lifetime with little risk-taking and lots of sitting on the part of its host, if it can make its host morbidly fat then it's a good gambit (at least, as long as it's doing so in a culture in which obesity is a feasible survival model for the host, i.e. our culture).
There are people with issues like this - things like Pradr-Willis syndrome. They tend to have some commonalities:
o They're incredibly large, and continue to gain weight all the time
o Sadly, they almost always die very young because of this
I'm talking about people who are always hungry, and may well be weighing 400-600 lbs by the time they turn 18, even after their parents have put locks on all the food cabinets, etc. Its a tragedy, and its a very well documented medical condition.
Most people, and by most I mean way, way more than 99%, do not have these conditions. Most people who are overweight are lazy, or acclimatized to their weight, or don't truly understand their food needs.
Its funny... I never used to think that there were a ton of fat people around. I figured that the obesity thing was exaggerated. Most people looked "normal," to me. Heck, I could have stood to lose 10 lbs or so, maybe 20, but I was still pretty normal.
Then I wised up, and shed 80 lbs, going from 240+ down to the low 160s. And you know what? I'm still not at a "skinny" body fat percentage. Healthy, sure, but not skinny.
Normal != Healthy. Fat is relative. Go hang out somewhere like Europe for a couple of weeks, then come back and see how many fat people you start noticing.
Good for you! I did something similar a couple of years ago. Its amazing how, once you actually decide to get healthy instead of just thinking that you should get healthy (or worse, pretending that you are healthy), making it happen becomes the easy part.
A few people will keep a significant amount of body fat no matter how much they excercise, unless they are actually starving.
While this is true, its moderately misleading; a very few people will have this condition, where the body will purge muscle before fat, etc.
Don't forget that everything we do will alter either the "calories in" or "calories out" side of the equation. Atkins people do weird things that get their body to reject calories that are ingested. Distance runners burn a lot more as part of their day. People doing a lot of weight work will convince their body to spend more calories building muscle instead of stockpiling fat, but don't generally actually burn them (the "metabolism" boost that you get after a workout has been shown to exist at a chemical level, but its only 20-30 calories or so for the day, so almost irrelevant).